Reading the Declaration at the Super Bowl?

Tuesday

Feb 4, 2014 at 11:22 AM

"The laws of nature and nature’s God… Self-evident truths… All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…" These are words from the preamble of our Declaration of Independence. These are words that set the context for the values described and defended in its iconic text; values such as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, fairness, justice and human freedom. These are the words that were read in their entirety as 110 million fans tuned in to watch the Super Bowl pregame show this past Sunday night.

"The laws of nature and nature’s God… Self-evident truths… All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…" These are words from the preamble of our Declaration of Independence. These are words that set the context for the values described and defended in its iconic text; values such as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, fairness, justice and human freedom. These are the words that were read in their entirety as 110 million fans tuned in to watch the Super Bowl pregame show this past Sunday night.

Two questions: First, do we, as Americans, have any idea where these words came from and what they mean? Second, what in the world do they have to do with a football game?

The French philosopher Luc Ferry suggests in his book A Brief History of Thought, that the American ideals of human dignity and racial equality are irrefutably drawn from a one key source: Christianity. Tim Keller, in his essay The Skeptical Student, summarizes Ferry this way. "(When you despise) Christianity you sever the living taproot to what are probably many of your own core values… Christianity originated (many) of the foundational ideas of peaceful civilization… The concept that every single human being, regardless of talent or wealth or race or gender, is made in God’s personal image and therefore has dignity and rights" would "never have established itself" without Christianity’s "teachings and doctrines."

Keller goes further to contend that Christianity serves as the cradle of the western ideal of justice. He cites our contemporary culture’s concern for the weak as one example. "In pre-Christian Europe" says Keller, "all of the elites thought that loving your enemies and taking care of the poor was crazy. They said…that’s not the way the world works. The talented and the strong prevail. The winner takes all. The strong eat the weak. The poor are born to suffer… But the teachings of Christianity revolutionized pagan Europe by stressing the dignity of the person…"

Both Keller and Ferry claim that Christianity elevated the underdog. For the first time in human history all men and women were viewed as equal. "So many systems of thought," says Keller, appealed "to strong, successful people, because they (believed) that if you (were) strong… you (would) prevail. But Christianity is not just for the strong; it’s for everyone…" This Christian ideal provided the context for liberty and justice for all.

Someone who also recognized that justice was uniquely implicit in the Christian worldview was the famous poet, W. H. Auden. By 1939 he was already a great writer, and he had predictably abandoned his childhood faith, as had many of his peers in the British intellectual classes. After World War II, however, he changed his mind and returned to Christianity.

In his account of his spiritual renewal Auden confesses his shock in realizing that the Nazis of the 1940s made no pretense of believing in human equality. To the contrary, the Third Reich brazenly attacked this Christian concept on the grounds that "to love one’s neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings." Auden felt convicted that these ideas had not arisen from "some barbaric land, but in one of the most highly educated countries in Europe" and, thus, he concluded he could no longer trust his own secular humanist values. "If I am convinced," he said, "that the highly educated Nazis are wrong, and that we highly educated English are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs? The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to… Either we serve the Unconditional, or some Hitlerian monster will supply an iron convention to do evil by."

Reading the Declaration of Independence before the Super Bowl? This may have struck some as being a bit odd. But, maybe it wasn’t that out of place after all. Maybe it was a fitting reminder that in the same way it is impossible to play a game of football without a rulebook, so too it is impossible to have human dignity and freedom without the values of orthodox Christianity. "Unconditional" standards are an obvious predicate to playing a game. Without such rules we would have chaos rather than a sporting event fit for a civilized people. Thomas Jefferson and W.H. Auden seemed to have believed the same of government. Both of them tell us that without the "Unconditional" standards of Christianity, i.e. those self evident truths endowed to us by our Creator, human beings always find ways to justify chaos that makes a Super Bowl with no rules look like child’s play in comparison.